For some Jewish women, ‘passing’ as Christian during the Holocaust could mean survival – but left scars all the same

A 1943 post office identification card for Annelies Herz, a German Jewish woman who managed to survive by posing as a Christian woman with the last name 'Stein.' From the Collection of the Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. Gift of Annelies and Helmut Herz, 393.89.

Travel case in hand, dressed in fashionable clothing and wearing a practiced, coquettish smile, Hela Schüpper Rufeisen sat aboard the train to Warsaw, Poland. No one on board would have suspected that beneath the coat of the young woman were strapped assorted handguns and several cartridge clips.

Schüpper Rufeisen, who was Jewish, relied on this dissonance between appearance and reality to ferry items into, out of and between the Warsaw and Krakow ghettos. Her carefully cultivated “Aryan” image and false papers listing her as Catholic made it possible to cross borders and survive encounters that would otherwise have ended in death.